1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a robot hand and a robot.
2. Description of the Related Art
In the biological and medical fields, analyses using materials derived from living organisms as samples have been performed. The materials derived from living organisms are biologic materials, such as blood and urine, cultured cell suspensions, etc., and are often liquid materials. To analyze such a liquid material, the liquid material is contained in a small centrifuging tube (microtube), and subjected to centrifugal separation or stored.
In recent years, systems have been proposed which include a robot that operates an analytical instrument or the like for the purpose of quickly analyzing many samples or analyzing samples harmful to humans. For example, PTL 1 describes an automatic cell-culturing device including instruments, such as an incubator and a centrifugal separator, necessary for a culturing operation and a robot for operating the instruments. The automatic cell-culturing device described in Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2008-54690 includes a robot hand for operating the instruments necessary for the culturing operation, and the culturing operation is performed not manually but by the robot that manipulates the robot hand.
In addition, systems including robots that convey microtubes have also been proposed. Such a system generally includes a robot that conveys microtubes between a physicochemical instrument for processing samples contained in the microtubes and a delivery table and a robot that conveys the microtubes between delivery tables.
When a system including a plurality of physicochemical instruments designed on the assumption that microtubes are manually attached and detached to and from the physicochemical instruments is to be established, a plurality of robot hands optimized in accordance with the orientations in which the microtubes are to be set in the physicochemical instruments may be selectively used. However, the step of exchanging the robot hands causes a loss of process time, and there is a problem that the overall process time will be increased.